SRI AUROBINDO
Translations
from Sanskrit and Other Languages
Kalidasa
Bhartrihari. The Century of Life
Miscellaneous Verses
The Transience of Worldly Rewards
Your gleaming palaces of brilliant stone,
Your bright-limbed girls for grace and passion made,
Your visible glory of dominion,
Your sceptre and wide canopy displayed,
These things you hold, but with what labour won
Weaving with arduous toil a transient thread
Of shining deeds on careful virtue spun!
Which easily broken, all at once is sped;
As when in lover’s amorous war undone
A pearl-string, on all sides the bright pearls shed
Collapse and vanish from the unremembering sun.